Hannah Arendt identifies the onset of genocide under the Nazi regime with the declaration that ‘the German people not only were unwilling to have any Jews in Germany, but wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of the earth.’1 Arendt famously, and unpopularly, contended that the crime was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people.2 Eichmann...

What transpires in the minds of violent criminals? Do their actions follow from uncontrollable impulses or simply reflect an absence of moral feeling? Abby Stein’s (2007) response is that violence is “...the inevitable outcome of severely damaging early interpersonal relationships” (p. 38). Her work as a forensic psychologist and Adjunct Associate Professor at the John Jay Criminal Justice prog...

We examine the length of time between when an individual feels sick and when he/she visits a doctor using survival analysis to capture the dynamic aspects of this behavior. If the disease is light, actions such as OTC medicine or sick leave are alternatives to visiting a clinic or a hospital immediately. The timing of the visit depends only the person's decision, not on a doctor's, so we can li...

This article explores the antagonism expressed by two different theoretical positions within medical anthropology towards the structural violence position: the culture as central approach and the post-structuralist approach. While medical anthropologists trained in cultural models of illness are disappointed by the lack of culture in the structural violence approach, medical anthropologists tra...

“Some time next year an embryo will be cloned from a human adult. It will be implanted in the uterus of a young woman selected with some care for her wide pelvis and robust health. A son will be born at the dawn of the third millennium. Neither angels nor news wires are likely to herald the birth. The father — an Asian plutocrat, South American kleptocrat or aging Western rock star — won’t be l...

Enhanced sensitivity to information of negative (compared to positive) valence has an adaptive value, for example, by expediting the correct choice of avoidance behavior. However, previous evidence for such enhanced sensitivity has been inconclusive. Here we report a clear advantage for negative over positive words in categorizing them as emotional. In 3 experiments, participants classified bri...

Intentions are seemingly ubiquitous in the criminal law. Their presence can turn reckless homicide into first-degree murder, reckless endangerment into attempted murder, violation of a security clearance into treason, and inadvertent mistake of fact into perjury. But should intentions play the pivotal role that they do in determining the categorization of crimes? Recently, there has been a live...

We examine the length of time between when an individual feels sick and when he/she visits a doctor using survival analysis to capture the dynamic aspects of this behavior. If the disease is light, actions such as OTC medicine or sick leave are alternatives to visiting a clinic or a hospital immediately. The timing of the visit depends only the person’s decision, not on a doctor’s, so we can li...